LOCAL HOUSE MEMBERS FRET ABOUT CUTS

That describes the bulk of San Diego County’s congressional delegation on the cusp of $85.4 billion in federal spending cuts.

“It’s the slowest-moving train wreck I’ve ever seen, and we’ve seen it coming for a year,” said third-term Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, the only delegation member to consistently oppose the budget deals leading up to Friday’s mandated start of “sequestration.”

Freshman Rep. Juan Vargas is used to budget battles in Sacramento, but he’s still taken aback by Washington politics.

“Behind the scenes (in Sacramento), there were always some grown-ups negotiating,” the San Diego Democrat said. “But here, you peel back the curtain and there’s no one there.”

Another freshman, Rep. Scott Peters, said he’s open to anything at this point because he can’t believe Congress hasn’t found a way to avoid sequestration.

But seven-term Rep. Susan Davis said there’s a palatable lack of political will in the halls of Congress.

“I thought saner people would have come to an agreement by now,” said Davis, D-San Diego.

Seven-term Rep. Darrell Issa said all of the hand-wringing, federal worker furloughs, social service cuts and defense contract cancellations can be abated easily.

“The president is choosing the worst possible solution, which is across-the-board cuts,” said Issa, R-Vista. “All the president has to do is say cut it here and don’t cut it there and I’m sure the House would act quickly.”

At issue are the first round of cuts stemming from a 2011 budget deal that was supposed to force Congress to identify programs that could be trimmed to slow the federal budget’s rate of growth. The cuts set to start Friday cover the rest of the fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30.

The Senate is scheduled to consider a Democratic bill that would close some tax loopholes and make selective reductions. But Republicans are balking, saying President Barack Obama already raised taxes by getting Congress to agree to let Bush-era tax cuts expire.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, uses the Transportation Security Administration — or TSA — as a prime example of government growth that can be checked.

Before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there was no TSA. By 2005, the agency had grown to roughly 18,000 employees and about 68,000 now, he said.

Trimming roughly 15 percent of that work force would save the equivalent of what the Department of Transportation has to cut under sequestration, according to Issa.

At San Diego Mesa College, political science professor Carl Luna said the American people are witnessing the latest example of “the increasing dysfunction of the national government.”

“Sequester was supposed to be the gun to the head, and now people look like they are going to be taking the bullet,” Luna said. “There are a lot of people right here in San Diego not sleeping at night because of worry over this.”

Hunter said he believes the Obama administration wants sequestration in order to squeeze more money out of the Pentagon.

“This is a stupid game and no real surprise, but it seems that one here really cared about it until just last week,” he said.

Hunter suggests that a budget bill coming up in late March to fund the government’s regular operations, known in Washington speak as a “continuing resolution,” may be the best chance to offset sequestration’s effects.

If it plays out that way, he argues that the defense industry would get enough money to avert cancellations or slowdowns of programs such as Navy ship repairs in San Diego’s shipyards.

“Defense has to be first — that’s just the way it is,” said Hunter, a Marine veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Vargas, who favors closing tax loopholes for the wealthy and enacting selected cuts, said sequester roughly translates to “kidnapping” in Spanish.

“The Spanish definition does it more justice, because I think democracy here has been kidnapped,” he said. “With the sequester cuts, there is no give and take.”

Davis said sequestration will clearly harm defense spending, even if not right away. “Everything is not going to fall apart on Friday,” she said. “But I think we can go about this a whole lot smarter. Otherwise, we are making decisions that are going to come back to haunt us.”

While she remains optimistic that a deal can be hammered out, she worries about the tea party influence in the House. “I just have this sense that more extreme members are not willing to find the balance.”

Some Republicans with tea party backing are championing sequestration as a long-overdue rescission on spending.

A spokesman for the Carlsbad-based tea party group Stop Taxing Us Now agreed that a more surgical approach is appropriate.

“But at least we are heading in the right direction and really slowing the growth of government spending,” said the spokesman, Brian Brady. “Drastic cuts in the federal budget are necessary.”

Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College and former House and Senate staff member, predicts that worker furloughs and disruptions in airport or other services will force a biparistan deal.

“But this is all far from over,” he said, referring to the broader ideological fight over large and costly entitlement programs. “Whatever happens, we’re talking about discretionary spending and the real problem lies in mandatory spending like Social Security.”